Your '16 looks awesome! I agree a USB hub is the most elegant solution. You could even de-box it and hide it in your enclosure. There will be some tweaking on the Max side of things to address 2 stribe8s as one continuous stribe16.

As for the Austrian Microsystems AS1107 vs MAX7221, I briefly looked at the datasheet and they look pretty nice. But they don't seem to provide an SPI serial interface like the MAX7221. Also, the power requirement per chip seems a little high (each one requires 500ma?). Definitely worth investigating and nice find!

marekbuk: Let me know if you got this sorted or not - I had the same problem - one of them recovered when I unpeeled it and restuck it, the other was dead. Let me know how many you need and drop me a line w/ your mailing address.

Nice looking part. Looks like you can stack them end to end, but they'd be spaced kind of far apart width-wise. Take 4 of these and add a touchstrip and you basically have a Stribe1, but with a lot wider spacing. One of the intended features of the Stribe1 is you can put several right next to each other with no gap.

These relatively simple hardware modifications will convert an original Stribe Prototype so it will work with the new firmware that Scott wrote for the Stribe1 modules. This essentially converts an "old-school" Stribe Prototype into the equivalent of 8 Stribe1 modules, with some limitations.

The purpose of this project was to avoid "orphan-ing" the community of existing Stribe Prototype owners with the old firmware and apps, which aren't getting much love these days. Removing this development fork means that everyone will benefit as we move forward with developing apps for the Stribe.

Kudos and massive thanks to Scott for all his hard work!

If you own a Stribe Prototype and would like me to perform this mod for you, please get in touch!

One thing you will run into is that the value will sort of float around where you last touched, but will not stay in any predictable way. What you want to do is put a 10K resistor between signal and ground. This will pull the voltage to zero when you're not touch, and you will get more accurate results.

To save the last value touched you will have to account for this in your firmware, or in your software (Max patch).

"I assume, in terms of the Stibe, using the soft pots, they act as sliders."

Actually, the stribes don't act as sliders. Each one is a long sensor, but it can be touched anywhere at any time, you do not need to slide from bottom to top. You will get a slightly different voltage from each position on the softpot, then the ADC on the Arduino converts this to a value between 0 and 1023. Depending how you've wired it, the 0 can be the top or the bottom of the strip.